Using a Mac Crash Report to Debug a Patch

Hi Forum: I recently learned how to decipher a Mac crash report as a way to debug a crashing Max/MSP patch. In case this is useful to you, I’m posting how I did it. The first screenshot below shows the top of the crash report. The "Process" line tells you that Max is what crashed. Then down a bit in the report the "Crashed Thread" line tells you which thread caused the crash. The "Exception Type" & "Exception Codes" tell you what kind of crash happened. (Read more about that here: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330727-263.html ) The second screenshot shows thread 14, the one that crashed my patch. All the lines are in reverse chronological order, so line 0 is actually the last thing that happened before the crash. If you look at line 0, you can see that "com.cycling74.line-" is listed. Don’t let the hyphen fool you, this is a line~ object & it’s the thing that crashed my patch. I would have NEVER thought this object could be the culprit. As soon as I looked at how line~ was functioning in my patch, however, I found the problem. Hope this is helpful to someone out there. Happy patching!